Lab confirms lead poisoning killed Beethoven

Tests fulfill composer's wish for investigation.

Tests fulfill composer's wish for investigation.

December 07, 2005|TED GREGORY Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO -- About five years ago, William Walsh welcomed a man into his office who had a strange mystery to unravel. The man opened a metal box, laid out a swath of green felt on Walsh's desk and placed a few bone fragments on the fabric. They were pieces of a skull that had surrounded one of the greatest musical minds of all time, the mind of Ludwig van Beethoven. At least, that's what the visitor said. On Tuesday morning, Walsh stood at a podium at Argonne National Laboratory near Darien, Ill., and verified what some had suspected about the great composer who was plagued for three decades by digestion problems, chronic abdominal pain, irritability and depression: He died from lead poisoning. So confounded and distressed by his plight, which also included extremely foul body odor and halitosis, Beethoven left written requests that a physician examine his body after his death to help determine the cause of his demise to save others from the same fate. Using advanced X-ray technology at Argonne, scientists helped confirm that Beethoven, who died in 1827 at the age of 56, had 60 times more lead in his system than what is considered average today. "Now, 178 years later, we're finally fulfilling the request of Ludwig van Beethoven," Walsh said Tuesday. "There were a few bureaucratic obstacles to leap over." But the bureaucratic obstacles -- which included finding a lab that could test the skull fragments thoroughly without damaging them and then getting approval to do the work -- were scaled and conquered almost three years ago when Walsh teamed with Argonne physicists Ken Kemner, Derrick Mancini and Francesco DeCarlo. Validating the authenticity of the bones was more complicated. It wasn't exactly the DaVinci Code, but the saga had moments of scientific, artistic and historic drama. It started in 1990, when Paul Kaufmann's mother died in Vence, France, while looking after her brother. Kaufmann, a successful entrepreneur from Danville, Calif., and his wife Joan, went to France to clear out the old house where his mother and uncle had lived. The Kaufmanns' ancestors were prominent in artistic and scientific circles dating back to Beethoven's era and had collected artifacts throughout the years. Paul and Joan Kaufmann found the squalid, dusty three-story house ransacked by scavengers in search of artistic and historic treasures. They also found a key in the purse of Kaufmann's mother that opened a safe in a bank. In that safe was a tin box that contained bone fragments. "Beethoven" was scratched on the inside of the box's cover. In a phone interview Tuesday from California, Paul Kaufmann said he was mystified and fascinated. He brought the bones back to California, ordered the rest of the material from the house shipped to his home and stored the tin box of fragments in a safe in a bank in Danville. He was planning to determine the source of the bones sometime after retirement. He'd still not done so by August 1999, when he was approached by William Meredith, director of the Beethoven Center at San Jose State University. Meredith, who had possession of a few locks of Beethoven's hair, persuaded Kaufmann to collaborate on finding if the skull and hair were a genetic match. That led them in 2000 to the Warrenville, Ill., office of Walsh, who has an international reputation in forensic science. Meredith and the Kaufmanns asked Walsh to test the fragments and hair -- without destroying them -- to help determine their validity. Walsh took one skull fragment, about 1 inch by 2 inches and a quarter-inch thick, and went hunting for a lab. Two years and an international search later, he found one about 20 miles away -- the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne. He persuaded physicists Mancini, DeCarlo and Kemner to use an extremely sophisticated X-ray analysis to examine the fragment and hair. What they found was an exact match of an analysis done earlier on the hair. Researchers also found other interesting insights into Beethoven, including the absence of mercury in his body. Mercury was a treatment at the time for syphilis. Its absence casts doubt on rumors that Beethoven had the disease, Walsh said.